French settlements in America differed from those of their European rivals. As one workman says at the beginning of Black Robe, "The English and Dutch have colonists. We have priests." Relatively few women or families migrated to New France, creating a mostly male community around Quebec. Instead of colonies, New France consisted of scattered trading posts.

While the Jesuits endured wilderness hardships to win Native American souls, French fur traders--known as courreurs du bois (literally, runners of the woods)--engaged in an elaborate exchange network that took them to the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley. Unlike the celibate Jesuits, the traders often formed familial relationships with Native American women. Their children, half Native, half French--known as metis--conducted trade and diplomatic relations between the two groups.

French trade with the Native peoples did not encourage colonization, but it did establish loyalties with the Algonqian-speaking peoples and the Hurons, both of whom were enemies of the Iroquois. Gift-giving provided the cement that kept trade relations secure. As Black Robe shows, Native peoples expected unconditional gifts as a sign of friendship and resented the parsimony and bargaining that characterized European trade. Among the most valuable gifts were European blankets, guns, knives, kettles, and whiskey. (The movie omits French trade in muskets.) Native hunters supplied fur, skins, and hides that found enormous markets in Europe.

European technology, such as the muskets shown in Black Robe, often awed Native peoples. Yet their amazement at "Captain Clock," an incident well documented by contemporary sources, showed their skepticism about European values. Living by clock time and regularly sounding bells, as the French did, introduced a daily schedule quite absent from the more spontaneous Native culture. In the movie, they make fun of the "Captain" that rules the day. The clock, shown correctly in the film, had one hand to measure the hours; a hand to count minutes did not appear until the next century.

Contemporaries noted other significant differences of culture and custom. Native Americans kept their names secret not only because they revealed their private spiritual beings, but also because they changed their names as they passed through different stages of life. The lack of written language encouraged Natives to cultivate remarkable memories for the spoken word. The same was true of most 17th-century Europeans who, unlike the educated clergy, could not read or write either.

The major cultural contrast of Black Robe involves different views of the spiritual world. While Catholicism emphasized achieving eternal life after death, Native American religions saw the earthly world alive with spirits. For instance, Chomina sees the forest spirit (or Manitou in the Algonquian language) as he lay dying. And just as Christians relied on priests to interpret spiritual mysteries and guide believers through life, so the Alonquins used sorcerers to interpret dreams and offer remedies against the evils that afflicted them. Nonetheless, each viewed the other's beliefs with doubt and scorn.

The scenes of Iroquois torture reveal another religious experience that many Jesuit priests and Algonquian enemies suffered. These physical torments allowed the Iroquois to claim spiritual superiority over their rivals (and perhaps were not much different in their horror and purpose than Catholics and Protestants burning each other at the stake). For Native Americans, war (like everything else on earth) had a spiritual side that tested a warrior's inner being. And the ability of Jesuits to withstand such ordeals of the flesh proved their own spiritual worthiness.

These cultural interactions had important political consequences. While the French established enduring relations with the Algonquian nations, the rival English formed trade and military ties with the Iroquois. During the 17th century, these alliances with European peoples intensified the conflicts among Native Americans and caused high mortality.

Added to the epidemic diseases that destroyed entire groups, as shown among the Hurons in Black Robe, contact with the Europeans proved calamitous to Native American cultures. The drastic drop of population encouraged the kidnapping and enslavement of enemies who would subsequently become full members of Iroquois society. In these circumstances, the scene in Black Robe of Iroquois randomly killing their prisoners seems unlikely.

The movie correctly shows that Native Americans were not passive in their encounters with Europeans. In many cases, they embraced European culture eagerly, too eagerly. As Chomina remarks in the movie, "That is our undoing and it will be our ending." Such contacts not only brought incurable, infectious diseases, but made Native peoples more dependent on European goods, leading them to surrender more of their autonomy.

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